GREAT AND MATCHLESS WISDOM UNLEASHED!

A WEEK’S DESCENT INTO MADNESS

Stupefied.  That was my condition a week ago yesterday when the Chosen One, standing on the White House Lawn, boldly copped to two crimes on national telly.  Dogged by reporters asking him about soliciting Ukrainian aid against his presumed opponent in the upcoming presidential election, Joe Biden, Trump turned back to the press and delivered a philippic: “China should start an investigation into the Bidens, because what happened in China is just about as bad as what happened in Ukraine.”

I was stunned.  Was he doubling down against the Constitution?!  Incriminating himself again—after the infamous phone call of July 25?  He should call his personal lawyer back from Ukraine—and be quick about it!

He was not quick enough, I soon learned.  By Friday night, before you could say “scapegoating,” the president had thrown Rick Perry, his Secretary of Energy, under the impeachment bus; Perry “made [him] do it,” Trump claimed, by insisting that he phone the newly elected Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.  Perry admitted that he pressed Trump to call Zelensky several times, but insisted it was all about a cooperative energy plan between the two nations and he never mentioned the Bidens.  I went to be bed Friday night wondering who, if either, was telling the truth.

Saturday I awoke to a fierce fire fight on Twitter between President Trump and Utah’s Senator Mitt Romney.  Romney had the temerity to wander off from the docile elephant herd to find fault with the president’s China request: “By all appearances, the President’s brazen and unprecedented appeal to China and Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden is wrong and appalling.”

The master of tweeting fired back in a series of scattershot salvos, including: “Mitt Romney never knew how to win.  He is a pompous ‘ass’ who has been fighting me from the beginning, except when he begged me for my endorsement for his Senate run (I gave it to him), and when he begged me to be Secretary of State (I didn’t give it to him)…He is so bad for R’s!”

Before I could peer out of my foxhole another round came whistling overhead: “I’m hearing that the Great  People of Utah are considering their vote for their Pompous Senator, Mitt Romney, to be a big mistake.  I agree!  He is a fool who is playing right into the hands of the Do Nothing Democrats!  #IMPEACHMITTROMNEY”

The round turned out to be a dud.  Romney remains extremely popular in Utah, as was proved days later when a Salt Lake City pro-Trump rally found itself outnumbered almost three to one by Romney supporters.  It’s worth mention also that Utah has no provision for impeachment.

My hopes for a ceasefire come Monday were dashed with a bombshell that shook the geopolitical world.  The Chosen One, calling on his self-given “Great and Matchless Wisdom,” announced he was withdrawing American troops from Syria.  That decision was made without consultation with any knowledgeable person from either our State or Defense departments; rather, it came after an unmonitored phone call he alone had with Turkish President Recep Erdogan, a dictator who has long wanted a clear path to destroying the Kurds within Turkey’s borders, and in northeast Syria.  (Trump has a hotel and other investments in Turkey, so that possible self-dealing, in addition to his admiration for autocrats far and wide, could explain his otherwise inexplicable action.)

Trump’s surprise erratic move prompted rebuke from some of even his most fanatic backers and enablers in the Senate.  “A precipitous withdrawal of U.S. forces in Syria would only benefit Russia, Iran and the Assad regime,” Moscow Mitch McConnell, said.  The Senate Majority Leader went on to add that the pullout would “increase the risk that ISIS and other terrorist groups regroup.”

Little Marco Rubio agreed: “I believe the decision…was a grave error that is going to have incredible consequences that potentially have not been thought through.”

Even Lickspittle Lindsay Graham, Trump’s intimate golfing chum from South Carolina, meekly chirped his disagreement: “With all due respect, ISIS is not defeated in Syria, Iraq…certainly not Afghanistan….[The] withdrawal of our forces…puts our Allies, the Kurds at risk.”

This is the first truly major international crisis of the Trump Administration, long-feared by the rational world.  Astonishingly, it was ignited by Trump, all by himself, alone.  Where it will end nobody knows for sure, but there will be winners and losers, and early indicators tell us who is likely to be up and down.

THE WINNERS

• Turkey, which under autocrat Erdogan now is free to ethnically cleanse itself of its centuries-old foe, the Kurds, our best friends and allies in the Middle East.

• ISIS, the Islamic terrorist group that will rise again, now that the 10,000 prisoners the Kurds were guarding are free to go and inflict more terror on the world, ourselves included.

• Bashar al-Assad and his Syria, now that the U.S. has bailed on the Kurds and the free Syrian resistance in the country’s north, which will be left to the butcher’s mercies.

• Iran, always grateful for the reduction of U.S. military presence in the Middle East.

• China, in line to ascend to the world’s economic throne.

• Russia, the biggest winner of all, realizing its dream of driving the U.S. out of the Middle East, as well as gaining more geopolitical influence over its southern neighbors; Putin must be smiling over his continuing success at humiliating America around the world.

THE LOSERS

• The Kurds, the Middle East’s hapless besieged orphans without a secure home, our best and bravest ally thrown to the wolves again by the Americans who betray them.

• Israel, our longtime friend that sees its likely foes free to unite against them to the north and the east.

• American fundamentalist Christians who fear the scattered Christian communities in northeast Syria will face massacre.

• Saudi Arabia, the ultra conservative kingdom with the vulnerable oil fields, fearful of a more powerful and more enlightened Iran settling some old scores.

• NATO, weakened by member Turkey acting in violation the must-be-a-democracy rule, behaving as though its real interest lies not in Europe, with its commitment to democracy and tolerance, but rather in the Islamic Middle East. 

• USA, made the laughingstock of the world by the inexplicable actions of a both insane and dull-normal buffoon presiding over a nation that for a time stood for freedom, democracy, and fair and open dealings with others in the world community.  Our handshake was our bond.  Now it’s worth a degree from Trump University.

Yes, I know all nations rise and fall.  I just never guessed how brief our tenure on top would be.

THE DEVIL YOU KNOW

TIME FOR AN EXORCISM

At long last, the tide has turned and the Orange-Crested Swamp Monster from the Triassic is in full retreat.  Once more, Donald J. Trump, the self-proclaimed stable genius, is—consciously or not—in self-destructive mode.  His horses have fled the barn, leaving behind only the bats in the belfry and the toads around him.  Might this madness also explain his antic threats to arrest Adam Schiff for treason and his warning of a civil war to come if he is removed from power through impeachment?

Fear not.  Coming to our defense is the politically gifted House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who has caught the impeachment wave at just the right time to skillfully deliver us to that bright golden shore…a nation sans Trump.  We all have a brave anonymous whistleblower to thank for our likely deliverance.  He or she gave us a detailed report on how the president violated the Constitution by trying to extort from Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky dirt on Joe Biden in exchange for the $391 million in aid—$250 million of it for weapons in its defense against Russian aggression.  Congress had already passed the aid package, but Trump held-up their release to get his quid pro quo, thus delaying weapons needed to hold off the Russians, who had had already taken by force of arms Crimea and big chunk of eastern Ukraine in a shadow war.  (Question for myself:  Was Putin in on this scheme that favored his forces?) 

Trump and his lickspittle attendants seem to have been caught flat-footed by the Whistleblower’s complaint.  The usually prompt GOP fog machine was slow to sputter into life, and then only belched out sporadic gusts of fecal wind to cloak the naked truth.  The first feeble salvo of “there was no quid pro quo” (Trump’s still using it) fell short; correct, the president never got his dirt on Biden, but the very attempt to solicit interference in our politics from a foreign country is unconstitutional. 

Next came the claim (still resounding in the boondocks) that the president had broken no law with his actions.  More GOP slight-of-word deception; by “law” they mean statute law, say, a state law against driving without a license, not Constitutional law, which considers his conniving with a foreign nation for political help an abuse of power and takes precedent over any other legal code in force.  

More recently we heard the “it’s only hearsay—the Whistleblower didn’t personally hear the call in question” defense.  Really?  Are those folks serious? The President’s own redacted version of his call to Zelensky admits to the high crime alleged in the complaint.   Moreover, according to the Whistleblower, he heard from “more than half a dozen government officials” in putting together his complaint.  (Our president has now magically reduced that number in his stressed mind to one “spy” who supplied the Whistleblower his information; that spy then passed the “lies” to “Shifty Adam Schiff,” Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, who Trump has branded a “traitor.”  From Trump’s own mouth, both have cause to fear for their lives.  Isn’t threatening a judge or a witness another cause for impeachment?)

 Let’s consider for a moment an inherent weakness of the “it’s-only-hearsay” argument.  Where do hearsayers get their knowledge?  Must be from either the perpetrator or perpetrators of an event, or from eyewitnesses to that event, via leaks.  If the event is illegal or shady, it’s the eyewitnesses who are most likely the leakers, not the perpetrators.  Doubters might compare the testimony of the Whistleblowers’ six or more informants (suspected witnesses) about the crucial July 25 Trump-Zelensky phone call with the lies and deceptions of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, a perpetrator who, after more than a week of lies and deceptions, finally copped to being on the line listening.  Let’s hear more hearsay.

During the Mueller Investigation, we often heard discussed “consciousness of guilt,” indications that a perpetrator knew he was doing wrong at the time.  Well, we have a singular example of that in Ukraine-gate, too.  Seems Trump and his team reviewed the transcript of the July 25th phone call with Zelensky and decided it was too hot to handle.  So they moved it from the computer archive where state-to-state communications are normally stored to the top-secret lock box very few can access.  Rumors have it that the Trumpers have also hid transcripts of the president’s phone calls with Putin and the Saudi Royal Family and possibly other head-of-state butchers.

The impeachment issue could be quickly resolved with congressional committees’ access to those “misfiled” documents.  All Americans deserve to know what “deals” Trump made with our skins in his “secret transactions.”   Have we been sold out to Vlad?  Un?  Bin Salman?  Rupert?

We must be told. 

Until then, let us pray his minders are able to keep the “Unhinged One” away from the nuclear football.

DON’T BE A BARNEY, NANCY…

CATCH THE IMPEACHMENT WAVE WITH US!

Madam Speaker: how many crimes must The Chosen One commit before he is held accountable?  We now add  attempted extortion of a foreign nation (Ukraine) to a lengthy list of unpunished offenses.  Purpose?  To get political dirt on a domestic rival.  Pile that on routine abuses of power, a conspiracy to collude with Russia in fixing the 2016 election, witness tampering, money laundering, tax evasion, continuous violations of the Constitution’s emoluments clause, stealing from a charitable fund, sexual assault, campaign funding violations, paying off sexual partners for their silence…and no doubt many high crimes and misdemeanors not yet revealed.

If you quibble that he hasn’t been convicted of some of these charges, I remind you that he obstructs justice almost daily to prevent their investigations and near-certain convictions.  Further clouding the picture, he has told 12,019 public lies, as of August 12, 2019 (according to The Washington Post).

Even the ever-cautious and wary Congressman Adam Schiff says we have now crossed the Rubicon.  Yes, Nancy, that’s your cue to cry havoc and let slip the dogs of impeachment on this surviving Orange Crested Thecodont from the Triassic.  Don’t play the political card that being so bold would jeopardize competitive House seats in the upcoming presidential election, which you correctly believe the Dems will win.  Sometimes you must rise above politics…say, when the Constitution is at stake.  Do the right thing, even if it is risky.

If the Constitution is worth saving, it’s worth obeying.

Surf’s up, Nancy.  Let’s hang ten*.

(*A pseudonym.)

ESCAPE FROM SCAMDOM

NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN

The phone rang at 10:10 a.m., and I figured it was probably another robo-call, making it the third of the day, which was right on time; I average 15 such nuisance calls a day.  Usually I check the origin of the call—Anaheim, Brea, Dendron (wherever that may be)—and hang up, before the seven seconds of silence ends with a dial tone.

“Private caller,” it read.

I didn’t hang up.  It might be someone I knew.

“Hello?”

“Grandpa, it’s Steve,*  I’m in trouble, and I really have to talk to you.  Pardon the voice.  I’m fighting a cold.”

I was surprised to hear from my grandson, a college senior due to graduate next June, so early in the morning…and in trouble.  “What’s wrong?”

“I want to keep this between us.  Don’t get my Mom or Dad involved….  You know my friend Michael?”

“I don’t think so, why?”

“Well I was in Mike’s car this morning, and he was high and drove through a stop sign.  A cop pulled us over and Mike got in argument with him, so they searched the car and found cocaine under my seat.  It wasn’t mine…I didn’t know it was there, but they’ve taken us to the Burbank police station.”

I was confused, tongue-tied, slow to respond.  My wife, sensing something wrong, joined me to listen in. 

“What can I do, Steve?” I finally asked.

“I’ve got to go now,” he said in a rushed and hushed tone.  “Here’s my public defender—he’ll fill you in.”

My wife wrote out a note for me: Doesn’t sound like Steve.  That’s a Midwestern accent.

“Mr. Meyer?  I’m Nicholas Keca.  I’m defending Steve.  As he told you, he’s innocent.  He took a drug test and passed.  Now we’ve got to get him out of jail.  Can you post bail?  It’s $5000.”  

“I don’t have that kind of ready cash,” I said, feeling utterly lost.  My wife scribbled me a note: Lawyer?  Sounds like a bail bondsman to me.

“Have you contacted his father?” I asked.

“Steve doesn’t want to do that, as he told you.  He had one call to make and you were his choice.  Besides, the judge has issued a gag order.  And he can’t make another call for 12 hours.  That means he’ll have to spend the night in jail.”

Gag order?  Denied another phone call?  It didn’t make sense to me, but I’ve never been in jail and know next to nothing about jailhouse procedures.  My wife wrote another note to me: He’s trying to scare you.

“I have a credit card, but I don’t know how to—”

“You can wire the money,” said Mr. Keca, “It’s very easy to do.  And by law, you are guaranteed to get your money back.  Here’s how you….”  There followed directions for fund-transfer directions that I couldn’t begin to follow.  

Before I could ask him to explain the process more slowly, in more detail, my wife slipped me another note: Get his name, company, phone number. 

Good advice.  “What’s your name again?  Nicholas…last name?”

“Ketcha.”

“How do you spell that?”

“K-e-c-a.”

“And your phone number?”

Hesitation on the other end.  “Are you asking me for it because you’re going to call me back?” 

“No” came out of my mouth on its own.

Click.  Hang-up.

What?  Why?  Was it all bogus?  A scam?

I couldn’t be sure, and my grandson still might be in the Burbank jail for days, waiting for bail to be posted.

So I broke a confidence and phoned his dad, my son Ken, and repeated the story I’d been told by the mysterious public defender with the odd name of Keca.

I didn’t get to finish.  He burst into emotional concern, cut me off, left work in a rush, and headed for the Burbank hoosegow.

About an hour later my son phoned me back, his voice teeming with relief and jollity.  The Burbank police had laughed when he came to claim his son.  It had even happened to one of the officer’s parents.  Yes, it was an everyday scam, perpetrated mainly on the aged.

“But how did they know Steve’s name and my name and the relationship?” I asked.

My son chuckled.  “Dad, this is the digital age: Facebook, Twitter…there’s any number of ways they could have figured it out.  There’s no privacy anymore.  You’re from a different time.”

Apparently so, based on the day’s evidence.  I had been gullible.  Had shown myself an easy mark.  And I felt a lot older than I had the day before.

“All’s well that ends well,” the wise Bard wrote.  It did for my son, who after the jailhouse stop drove directly to Steve’s apartment, woke him from sleep, and hugged him with elation.

As for me, I’m starting to feel there is no guarantee of it ending well.  Without my wife’s guardianship, I’d already be dubbed the Duke of Dupedom.

*Names changed for reasons of privacy.

TURNING GREENLAND GREEN

Meet you on the Beach

Imagine you are Donald Trump.  No, scratch that.  Sorry.  Instead, imagine you are President of the United States and the Danish Prime Minister says to you, “we want to buy California.”  You might get a little testy with PM Mette Frederiksen and dismiss her offer as “absurd.”

You might also be tempted to call her “nasty” and cancel your scheduled trip to Denmark, but then you remember that country (not to be confused with the city of Belgium or the non-existent nation of Nambia) is a member of NATO and among the best friends we have abroad, and you forgive the imagined slight.

Alas, not our president.  The Chosen One felt disrespected by a tiny ally who has lost more troops per capita in fighting alongside us in our endless Middle Eastern wars than any other country.  How dare Denmark not do our bidding!  We want that big white island! 

Why, you may ask, this sudden interest in Greenland?  It’s not even green…and most of it lies within the Arctic Circle, where it gets mighty cold…and where Titanic-sinking icebergs lurk.  Moreover, only slightly over 56,000 folks—mostly native-born Inuits—live on the biggest island in the world (836,330 square miles).  What’s the lure?

Senator Tom Cotton, the hawkish junior senator from Arkansas whose politics fall slightly to the right of Charlemagne’s, provides a sound answer: Realpolitik.  He says he himself spoke to the Danish ambassador some months back on possibly buying Greenland from Denmark.  Why?  To thwart the scheming Chinese, who have invested considerably in tapping Greenland’s extensive iron ore reserves and have set up state-of-the-art research stations in the Arctic.  Outsider China wants a place among the five nations that “own” the region by having land fronting the Arctic Ocean.  Own?  Well, are claimants to the portions of the Arctic seabed, anyway, according to the UN Conference on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS); those five nations—in descending order in size of claim—are Russia, Canada, Norway, Denmark (Greenland is an autonomous Danish territory), and the United States (by way of Alaska).  The present size and extent of claims is disputed; Russia, Canada, and Denmark all claim the North Pole, for example.  But, thankfully, conflicting claims have not prompted violence…yet.

The strategic value of Greenland is nothing new.  On April 9, 1941, the first anniversary of the German invasion and conquest of Denmark, the Danish ambassador in Washington signed on his own an agreement with the United States to jointly defend the remote territory.   Following the United States entrance into World War II, Americans and Danes set up and manned weather stations in various parts of Greenland, and their work is said to have provided General Dwight Eisenhower with the crucial weather reporting he relied on to launch the successful invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944.  In 1943 the United States completed construction of Thule Air Base on the northwest coast of the island, 750 miles north of the Arctic Circle—the northernmost U.S. military base then and now.

The big island’s strategic importance only increased during the long Cold War, when the United States and the Soviet Union stared each other down across the frozen white polar cap, anxious fingers never far from missile launches likely to bring End Times in a flash.  Whew!  But the Cold War has thawed and that danger has passed…hasn’t it?  

So does military strategy really explain the recent rush to Greenland?  There must be more to this multinational claim-staking and seafloor-grabbing than meets the ear…or appears on the front pages of our newspapers.  There is.  Global warming, which scientists and tree-huggers and pointy-headed academics have correctly warned us about for years in dire terms, apparently provides climate-change deniers a short-term upside.  Heat melts ice, and that melt exposes soil, and that soil contains minerals, and in the mostly untouched Arctic it does so big time!

Ready for the size of the bonanza!  How about an estimated 90 billion barrels of oil?  Add 1,669 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.  Count also huge reserves of coal in just Russia alone, which also mines approximately 25% of the world’s rough diamonds.  Now throw in a vast cache of iron ore, bauxite, titanium, uranium, platinum, palladium, copper, nickel, silver, gold, lead, zinc, and so on.  

Among those so-ons are perhaps the greatest prizes of all—those rare earth minerals that have become essential to modern living.  Their compounds are to found in most electrical things, from color television sets to cell phones, from rechargeable batteries to catalytic converters on cars, to name but a few applications.  At present the Chinese, who apparently have no qualms about polluting the air its own citizens breathe, control 97% of these rare-earth metals…and can raise prices at their whim.  Judging from its activity up north, China means to stick its giant panda paw into the Arctic reserve and defend its monopoly.

All would-be extractors get a bonus blessing from global warming.  The ongoing melt has opened for business the New World’s long-fabled Northwest Passage, and opened even wider and for months longer Russia’s own Northeast Passage (aka the Northeast Sea Route), thus facilitating the easier transport of raw materials to manufacturers serving growing and waiting markets.  Think of the surplus of goods and trinkets within everyone’s budget!  Imagine having weekly specials on diamonds at every 7-11!

Yes, of course, these new riches come at a very steep price.  Try to calculate the amount of carbon dioxide and sundry industrial pollutants spewed into the atmosphere.  Not just from the production process but the melting Arctic permafrost as well.  Sports fans may have to wear oxygen masks while watching the ultimate competition—Capitalists versus Oligarchs for the title of Last Extractor Standing.  They might have to wear nose plugs too to ward off the stench of a few billion decomposing bodies in the tropics wafting northward to the inconvenience  of  players and viewers.  Yes, it’ll probably be televised and streamed on your iPhone.  Enjoy.

Why do I feel depressed?  I don’t believe in collective guilt.  Must I die with the rest?  I feel this nagging need to go back and watch On the Beach again to prepare for our torrid end…without Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner for company.  But I lack the courage.  Instead, I’ll probably join the Chosen One and his legions of lobotomized climate deniers and choose a lobster’s end, taking cold comfort in knowing earth’s Sixth Mass Extinction was not due to any mindless comet or volcanic indigestion, but my own species’ greed and lust.  May future life forms both thank us and forgive us.  Perhaps they will better treat their gifted planet.

STRANGE STIRRINGS IN OC POLITICS

Meet Our Leading Ladies…

The latest big surprise in California politics is that Democratic Party membership in Orange County topped Republican Party membership for the first time in living memory for most of us.  Proving?  That donkeys can fly and the political climate is changing along with the weather in California’s mighty fortress of ultra-conservatism—changing dramatically.  How else explain the 2018 election in which all six of the county’s Congressional districts went blue?

A harbinger of that shocking shift showed itself in the 2016 presidential contest when Hilary Clinton edged Donald Trump by 102,813 votes.  Zounds! That was the first time a Democrat won Orange County in a presidential election since Franklin Delano Roosevelt defeated Alf Landon during the Depression days of 1936.  Wow!  That’s a long wait.  So what’s going on?  Are there major changes in the zeitgeist of what I use to consider our state’s smug Babbitt hutch?  To find out I decided to do some political polling myself and compare the results with professional pollsters, using this year’s Democratic Party’s primary race for its 2020 nominee.

Yes, yes, I know the limitations of early polls and have listened to the wise counsel not to take them too seriously... that they capture but a brief moment in time…that they all have their own margins of error…that some are for public consumption and others for the private use of the sponsoring political party…that even in this age of refined analytics, there is always the occasional outlier—the poll that somehow drifts into the twilight zone.  

I have heard all these caveats and more, and yet I will proceed in my three-way comparison in which I compare National Sentiment, where I take the last ten national polls* and average them out.  Compare that with California Sentiment, from the KGTV-TV/SurveyUSA poll of the state taken on August 8.  Compare both with Orange County Sentiment, specifically of the Huntington Beach Chapter of Drinking Liberally, a politically active group that, not surprisingly, leans to the left of the Democratic Party.  Here are the results:

My overall, hesitant conclusions?  Even Orange County, the most conservative redoubt in the Golden State, is loosening up, joining the progressive rest of California, leaving Trump worship behind to the benighted folks in Southern and Midwestern climes.

Some real, specific surprises here.  Warren is surging out west, the more so in our sample of Orange County voters.  And note who’s second there…not explained completely by Harris being a native daughter.  At the very least, the results show that Golden Staters have no reservations about having a woman head the Democratic ticket in 2020.

Perhaps the most significant surprise is Bernie’s diminished appeal, both nationally in his numbers now compared to those of 2016, but most tellingly in the Orange County results; the flame seems to have passed on to members of another gender. 

Texans have little support west of the West—that is to say, Calfornia—if O’Rourke’s numbers tell the truth.  And the mentally formidable Buttigieg’s numbers flag in our open-minded Golden State.  What gives?  The same might be asked of the polished Julian Castro’s disappointing showing.

OK, you want to trash my tyro’s try at polling.  Yes, I admit my OC sample size is small, and I am new to polling.  Add, as well,  that not much can be made of any political poll this far off from the event being tested.   

Still, could these be straws in the wind of an approaching, cleansing tornado?  The answer might well determine whether the last and best hope for democracy survives.

*Methodology:  I averaged the ten most recent national polls for the Democratic nomination for president moving from the most recent in August back to the beginning of the month.   I considered the Fox News poll of August 16; the HarrisX poll of August 15; the Economist poll of August 14; the Politico/Morning Consult poll of August 13; the Survey USA poll of August 9; the You Gov poll of August 7; the, Quinnipiac, the Politico/Morning Consult and the IBD/YIPP polls of August 7.

EMPTY NESTERS…AGAIN

It was about three weeks ago that my wife Timarie rushed in from the patio as I rose from my morning bed.   “Great news!” she shouted.

Trump resigned, I thought for an ecstatic half-second.

“The hummingbirds are back!”

A big-time letdown for me, for sure.  But I faked shared joy. “Wonderful.  How many eggs?”

“I see three eggs!” she said, still hyped.

I mentally added three to our resident menagerie of two dogs, two squirrels, one canary, fresh memories of a recently deceased cat, not to mention the unknown and unwanted nocturnal bandits—possums, rats, raccoons?—who harvested our failing attempt at a vegetable garden while we slept.  At least the hummers would not add to our food bill.

It did come as a surprise, though.  The new bird family had set up quarters not five feet from our sleeping heads, right behind the back wall of our house, in a ficus tree.  The nest was so well hidden that my green-thumber wife had not discovered it until she got her head buzzed by an agitated new mother-to-be protecting her clutch. 

Timarie quickly soared into a dither of delight over our new neighbors, as she had thrice before when those magnificent little atoms of quivering energy chose our humble yard to raise a family.   At such times my wife doubles as midwife, peeking in on nature’s progress as the eggs became nestlings became fledglings; yes, she’s the eternal mother type, the kind who ooohs and awws at the sight of every baby she sees in Ralphs check-out line, before giving the flattered new mom some friendly bit of advice on child-rearing.

About two weeks after Timarie had welcomed the new additions, she enlisted our six-foot, four-inch-tall son Franz to mount a ladder and photograph from above the little brood hidden in the thick thatch, presumably for inclusion in the family album.  Franz climbed up, clicked, and brought down puzzling news.  “There’s four of ‘em.”

Four?  How could that be?  I had wondered about three.  How can a tiny mother hummingbird sit on that many eggs, let alone carry them to term?  Or is it hatching?  Or whatever you call it?  I would have to look it up on Wikipedia.

Timarie was well ahead of me, and much closer to the birds. While our four eggs had looked similar to humming bird eggs to her, upon hatching she had no doubt we were dealing with a different species. The furtive parents were larger, flew even faster when they were out hunting groceries (and not nectar!) for the “not-so-little ones” screeching their demands through upturned beaks.  

What were they then?  Neither Timarie nor I are birders.  But Timarie thought they might be warblers.  I believed them to be finches.  But then what do I know of finches?  Well, not much.  I do know that finches—observed by Charles Darwin in the Galapagos Islands on his famous voyage aboard HMS Beagle in the 1840s—were fundamental to his formulation of his theory of evolution. Anything else that I know about finches?  Well, they are dappled.  Or at least that’s what I was told in a descriptive fragment from a famous poem by my second favorite poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins.  To honor him and strengthen my case, I post it here:

PIED BEAUTY

Glory be to God for dappled things—

For skies of couple-color as a brinded cow;

For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;

Fresh-firecoal chestnut falls; finches wings;

Landscape plotted and pierced—fold, fallow and plough;

And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;

Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)

With swift, slow, sweet, sour, adazzle, dim; 

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change,

Praise him.

Sorry for the break here…my dejected wife just came into my writing room to tell me the quads have quit the nest…have flown away.  Gone.  With their parents.

None to be seen.  For us both a cause for sadness whose cure, for me, can be found in nature, the great healer.  My mind turns again to a poem, this one by my absolute favorite poet, William Butler Yeats.  It has special meaning for me because Timarie and I were there, at Coole Park in County Galway, on our Irish honeymoon; on this very date in 1985, we braved a swarm of starved mosquitoes for a lakeside visit to see the descendants of Yeats’s swans paddling on the still water. 

THE WILD SWANS AT COOLE

The trees are in their autumn beauty,

The woodland paths are dry,

Under the autumn twilight the water

Mirrors a still sky;

Upon the brimming water among the stones

Are nine and fifty Swans.

The nineteenth autumn has come upon me

Since I made my first count;

I saw, before I had well finished,

All suddenly mount

And scatter wheeling in great broken rings

Upon their clamorous wings.

I have looked upon those brilliant creatures,

And now my heart is sore.

All’s changed now, since I, hearing at twilight,

The first time on this shore,

The bell-beat of their wings above my head,

Trod with a lighter tread.

Unwearied still, lover by lover,

They paddle in the cold

Companionable streams, or climb the air;

Their hearts have not grown old;

Passion nor conquest, wander where they will,

Attend upon them still.

But now they drift on the still water,

Mysterious, beautiful;

Among what rushes will they build,

By what lake’s edge or pool

Delight men’s eyes when I awake some day

To find they have flown away?

Ars longa, vita brevis.

YOUR MID-SEASON CORRECTION

Welcome back baseball fans, gamblers, and baseball fans who gamble.  Time for that annual midcourse correction wherein I tweak those spring selections and bring you up to date on the state of the various races, now that the July 31 trading deadline has passed.  First, let’s commend Major League Baseball for cleaning up its act.  No longer can the New York Yankees and a few big-money franchises “buy” a player they need after the July deadline via the waiver-wire scam.  Long overdue, sez I.

Let’s take a look at the major trades that should make a difference come the October playoffs.  First though, we consider those failures to trade that disappointed so many fans in New York and LA.  The first-place Yankees in the AL East Division, soft on the starting pitching, stood pat.  The NL West Division shoo-in Dodgers, weak in relief pitching, did not strengthen their bullpen.  Contrast that with the rising Houston Astros, arguably the best team in baseball, who flexed their muscles further by adding front-line starter Zach Greinke from Arizona and Joe Biagini and Aaron Sanchez from Toronto to an already powerful pitching staff for this year and those to come.  Outfielder Derek Fisher goes to the Blue Jays.

The National League East-leading Atlanta Braves secured big-time bullpen help in the persons of Mark Melancon from the Giants and Shane Greene from the Tigers.  Cost?  A few minor leaguers.  The busy Chicago Cubs, in a tight three-way battle with the Cardinals and Brewers for the National League Central Division crown, gained an edge by getting proven hitter Nick Castellanos from the Tigers.  They also loaded up on reliever relief with right-handers David Phelps from the Blue Jays and Dan Winkler from the Braves, as well as left-hander Derek Holland from the Giants.

In the American League Central the muscular, offense-minded Minnesota Twins shored up their mediocre bullpen by adding Sam Dyson from the Giants and ageless Sergio Romo from the Marlins.  In a gamble to keep pace with the Twins the second place Cleveland Indians dealt the talented but troubled narcissist Trevor Bauer to the Cincinnati Reds for another troubled talent, volatile Yasiel Puig in a three-way barter that saw the Reds send infield prospect Taylor Trammell to the Padres, and the Padres in turn send right-handed slugger Franmil Reyes to the Tribe. Meanwhile, the Tampa Bay Rays, trailing the Yankees in the American League East Division, and battling Boston and Oakland for a wild card spot, buffed up big by acquiring slugging first baseman Jesus Aguilar from the Brewers, second baseman Eric Sogard from the Blue Jays, and added  right-handed pitchers Trevor Richards and Nick Anderson from the Marlins.  The Red Sox, in need of pitching, traded for the Orioles’ starter, Andrew Cashner.

Of lesser, passing note, the upstart Giants received Scooter Gennett from the Reds, prized pitcher Marcus Stroman went to the Mets from the Blue Jays, and lefty Drew Pomeranz moved from the Giants to the Brewers.  The rest of the trades are minor and need not concern us when we place our bets on the October outcome.

So about those promised tweaks in my spring selections?  Not much change, really.  In the National League the Dodgers and the Cubs are right where I picked them—on top, where they will stay.  As for the National League East, the upstart Atlanta Braves jumped from third, where I picked them, to first, a place they will not relinquish till the playoffs.  My perennial pick for first place, the Washington Nationals, has slipped to a second place tie with the Philadelphia Phillies; look for one of them to be the first wild card team.  The second wild card team?  Try the Saint Louis Cardinals of the Central Division.

In the American League, the Western Division will finish Houston first and Oakland second, as I predicted in the spring.  In the American League East I picked Boston first, the Yankees second, and the dangerous Tampa Bay Rays third; drop the Red Sox to third and you have the new order of finish.  The American League Central is without doubt the league’s most exciting race.  In the spring I picked Cleveland to win it with Minnesota second, but the Twins were my long-shot pick of the year.  The pair are now in a fierce battle for the division pennant; the loser will be the first wildcard.  The second wildcard?  Either Oakland or Tampa Bay, flip a coin.

Now, what you been waiting for. How they will finish and the ultimate winner:

In the National League, the Dodgers will defeat the Cards and the Cubs will edge the Braves.  The Dodgers will beat the Cubs.

In the American League, the Astros will defeat the Indians and the Twins will upset the Yankees.  The Astros will trounce the Twins.

In the World Series the Astros will whip the Dodgers in six.

BN: The Dodgers have everything…except the key to beating an American League team.

Be thoughtful in how you spend your winnings.  A second yacht is not the way to thank me for giving you this inside information.  And remember that these selections are guaranteed.  If the teams do not finish in the order predicted, I will provide you picks for the following year free of charge!   

You’re welcome.

QUESTIONS FOR THE MAN: Will Straight Arrow Mueller Give Us the Answers We So Desperately Need?

I gave up on waiting for Godot long ago.  I almost gave up on ever hearing from Robert G. Mueller, the Special Counsel investigating the greatest scandal in our nation’s history.  Even those who have read—all or part—of his report on Trump and his gang’s treason know there are innumerable questions still to be answered.

Tomorrow we have the chance to pry some of them from Mueller when he appears before the House Judicial Committee and the House Intelligence Committee.  If we’re lucky, and he’s cooperative, and we ask the right questions, we just might get some much-needed answers as to how we save this nation of ours. 

I wish I were one of the interrogators.  I promise I would limit myself to only five general questions I would most like answered.  Here they are, Mr. Mueller:

• You tell us in your report that one of the reasons your team was thwarted in its search for the truth was that so many of the witnesses you questioned lied.  Why didn’t you name those liars if you were confident they were lying?  They should be exposed for the good of the country…and imprisoned for perjury.

• Why didn’t you subpoena the president and force him to testify before a grand jury?  So he would probably lie—isn’t that a cause for concern anent Trump’s governing of our nation?  Don’t its citizens deserve to know?

• What restrictions were put on you in your investigation?  Be specific.  Who imposed those restrictions?

• How many lines of investigation were still in process when you closed your investigation?  Were you ordered to close them down by Attorney General Barr?  Did you object?  Are there Justice Department plans to continue with them?

• What is the current fate of those investigations you referred to the Southern District of New York…those that pertained to money laundering, tax evasion, fraud?  (I have heard rumors that Barr has terminated them all.  Is that true?  If so, do we have any recourse at all to see justice done?

Finally, a question for you, personally, sir.  Will you please abandon your magnificent neutrality and come to the aid of your country (yes, again) in this, its most perilous hour?  Help us defeat this Trump-Barr Fascist putsch that threatens our fragile democracy, the last best hope for the survival of human kind?

Thank you…and good luck tomorrow.

LONG YEARS' JOURNEY INTO NIGHT

Our Presidents Speak

“Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people.”

-John Adams

“If a nation expects to be ignorant and free it expects what never was and never will be.”

-Thomas Jefferson

“A people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.”

-James Madison

“So interesting to see ‘Progressive’ Democrat Congresswomen, who originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe, the worst, most corrupt and inept anywhere in the world (if they even have a functioning government at all), now loudly and viciously telling the people of the United States, the greatest and most powerful Nation on earth, how our government is to be run.  Why don’t they go back and fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.  Then come back and show us how it is done. These places need your help badly, you can’t leave fast enough.  I’m sure that Nancy Pelosi would be very happy to quickly work out free travel arrangements!” 

-Donald J. Trump

How far we have fallen.   Sad. 

AVOCADOS: A CLARIFICATION AND A CELEBRATION

A few of you have asked what I meant in my last post by referring to avocados as that “marvelous gift from the Aztecs.”  Well, the word “avocado” is an English corruption of the word for ahuacatl in Nahuatl, the language spoken by the Aztecs.  Its literal meaning is “testicle,” but it’s a short metaphoric jump to the much-loved fruit that has traveled so widely from its origins in Southern Mexico, where the Aztecs held sway for a time.

Some early European arrivals in the New World called it the “alligator pear,” and that unflattering and botanically inaccurate label hung on for centuries.  Fortunately, “avocado” won the wider acceptance among word lovers and today indirectly honors the one-time rulers of Mexico.

Ahuacatl is not the only Nahuatl word that survives in our tongue today.   Try xitomatl (tomato) or chocolatl (chocolate) or tamalli (tamale), or even mexihco (the capital city of the Aztec empire).”  Other Nahuatl words have been absorbed into English, the great borrower among languages, the richest on earth.  No wonder it is the lingua franca for the modern world.

An Aztec glyph translated as “Place of Many Avocados,” a detail from the Codex Mendoza (1542). Credit: Courtesy Mexicolore.

I barely print my own poetry in this space, but given the cue above to do so here, I append for your review one of the few long narrative poems I’ve written.

LOVING AVOCADO TREES

I love my avocado tree.

Don’t get me wrong.

I love all trees,

A genetic thing I think

That goes back to Wotan

And I suspect before, 

When woods warmed my ancient forebears

As the ice backed slowly north.

But avocado trees and I 

Have a tight bond that

Ties back to the summer of forty-four

When I as a boy of eleven came

To California and delighted to find

One in my new back yard.

Of not much value, my neighbors soon let me know,

Neither for sale nor the table,

Just a seedling with little fruit flesh to eat.

But for me it was the best climbing tree

I would ever know, mature with

Thick lateral limbs spread to the 

Four corners of our small town compass,

Nobly shading half of our backyard

And the red-bricked patio where 

Our family of six often ate our dinner.

Sure, there was the downside chore

Of raking up the always shedding giant’s leaves

And the fallen rot of purple fruit with the

Seed wrapped in green-to-brown slime. 

But hey! Eureka! This was California!

That big seed with its creamy lumpy hide

Was prized by growers as hardy stock

On which to graft more commercial kinds.

My uncle happened to own a grove and paid 

Me 50 cents an intact pit that hadn’t split,

A princely sum of walking-around coin

In those pinched times of fin de guerre.

Did I say he was my uncle by marriage not by blood?

Owner of three car-part shops and wealthy as we were not,

Confident Calavo gentleman rancher of citrus groves as well

Who lured my machinist father and his family west 

With a wartime job and promises never kept...

Held Dad in a state of soft suspended penury 

Until my old man’s drive dried up.

This entrepreneurial uncle not my blood

Also held FDR in his florid-faced contempt

That surpassed the scorn he had for his hands,

“Lazy Mexicans” he’d mutter to a baffled me, 

A sheepish noontime orchard dropout 

When picking navels at their side.

And yet this lordly man who bossed about all

In my world and won my fear and lost my trust 

Unwittingly sealed my love of avocado trees.

Lacking a son he could call his own, 

He gave me gleaning rights to his La Habra grove,

Gave me first comb after the pickers went through

To use my baseball eye to spot the slight round

Curves hidden in a leafy roof of twenty shades of green

They had missed…and they missed plenty.

A Fuerte bonanza!  Prized produce 

Taken home to ripen on my roof

And sell when ready door-to-door

At the dear price of 40 cents per,

No chump change for the late Forties. 

For four boyhood years

I walked beneath that frog-green canopy 

Rent here and there by a thin shaft of sun,

Easy and alone in a dusty silence save 

For the rare rustle of a rat in the dry leaves,

Serene in my sacred grove of innocence,

Alone with my green thoughts in my own green shade.

Then I had to exit Eden for the wider world.

My uncle sold his groves and I went off to war.

He died before I came back to find an altered place,

All the groves gone, the old orchard towns uprooted

For stucco crates to house the hordes of postwar

Pilgrims crowding into the Promised Land

That never more would hold such promise.

Dear dead days as some poet said.

Yes, sure, some trees still remain, 

Backyard relics of that vanished time

Gracing a family’s table with Persea Americana

In scattered tracts here and there.

But trees in numbers moved south to Fallbrook

Or north up Santa Barbara way,

And when I settled in LA to busy

Myself with doing nothing worth recalling 

I went without a tree and felt the loss.

In later life, on the downside slide

Off a rough midlife hump,

I got another tree to love,

One of the backyard kind 

That gave shade and fruit alike

To me and my second family

In a seaside town not known 

As kind to growing Aztec nuts.

This ahuacatl is no premium market fare,

Not your noble buttery Fuerte,

Nor the choice round knobby Hass

(That mutant freak first grafted not far 

In miles and time from my uncle’s old spread) 

That ships so well to distant markets.

No, mine is an elongated lesser breed, 

Pebbled green in its springtime youth,

Then purpling slowly under the late summer sun

To reach table grade in its fall-winter ripening, 

Nearly as tasty as its betters if you eat it 

In its two-day prime when the lemon flesh

Softens to perfect, before rushing off

To the quick and stringy brown of fast decay.

Yes, the fruit is fine but the shade is better.

The thirty-foot giant is sheltering sky 

To our small backyard patio 

Where my wife’s many-colored thumb 

Has left a floral ring of pleasures

Around a half dozen fan-back chairs 

From which to watch the dusk dance 

Of late light through jostled leaves 

Hard by the sundown sea.

The tree and I are linked now through

Thirty-seven years of time and space

On our separate vegetable and animal ways,

And shared some ups as well as downs,

The up gift to me of two girls and a son,

And for it bumper crops in El Niño years 

Where from one trimmed branch

I could feed a whole office.

Sorrows brought us close as well

In what might be fancifully called 

The Tragedy of Three Trees.

A truly mighty stone pine once 

Stood a mere fifty feet north 

In my neighbor’s yard and thrust 

Its soaring needled crown 

Into high tension lines where a local lad

Reached up one day and touched his instant death 

In the company of his friend my son

Who fell to earth shocked but mercifully alive.

Death brought an ambulance and a coroner’s team

Soon followed by many lawyers set on fixing blame.

“Boys will climb trees,” I tried to tell them,

But they argued for a year before the blood money

Was counted out and my insurance was cancelled.

Only then did Edison’s agents come and grind down

The once great pine into heaps of sawdust

That left a gaping hole in our backyard sky. 

Not five years later came the burn again 

Forty feet south in my other neighbor’s yard,

In a shaggy tree that put out small but sweet peaches,

When a trimmer touched his steel blade to the same killer wire.

I heard the noontime zap and went out back to find

A dark young man spread like Christ thrown backward  

On a cross of boughs, smoldering and dead,

Enough to bring the close-by fire crew to take

 The husk of the poor man from Michoacán,

Removed from our view for who knows where,

To be mourned afar, later on, by strangers to us.

No lawyers showed to find blame for a fee,

The fried peach smoldered for days and lacking

Means to sprout more leaves, slowly died.

That left my tree the survivor of the three.

All the more towering now with its flankers gone,

Rough-barked tough for my kids to climb…

But not too high I made sure.

Then came the blindside blow from

My not neighborly west-side neighbor

Who passed on the gift of 

Proffered fruit and morning shade

By taking a chainsaw to its west-reaching arms,

(Perhaps to save a months’ long sweep-up

Of messy leaves and buds that marred

His otherwise clean and stark backyard)

But my tree buckled, steadied, suffered,

Almost died from a quarter’s loss from whole.

It barely bore fruit for a year or two,

Then came slowly back but not as before,

Dropping thumps on my bedroom roof at night,

The luckless embryos of alligator pears,

In a long summer rite of mass abortion.

The tree is old like me now

And its finished fruits are likewise few, 

Mostly reduced to only one clinging

To the very end of a burdened branch

Which I still like to watch dance doggedly

 In the late-day’s onshore breeze.

Older we get together,

Both with brittle limbs and a Shared calm before the shade.

 So who will go first?

Probably me,

All longevity stats considered.

So how do you say goodbye to a tree?

This lover does so with a too cute up-quip

And homage to a favorite poet in

His fond farewell:

Glory be to thee for dappling things!

SQUIRREL WARS

I had long suspected that animals are a lot smarter than we think they are.  Now I know it.  

My conviction centers on our venerable avocado tree outside our master bedroom that spreads its lateral limbs over the roof under which my wife and I share a bed.  This time of year the tree brings forth its infant fruit the size of a pregnant pea.  And that brings some unwanted diners who feast on them and drop their leavings in a predawn patter on that roof above our sleeping heads. 

Squirrels.  At least a pair that I have come to call the Rednik Family, after a color that faintly stains their coats.  Not only do they wake us before our time, they reduce our autumn harvest probably by half with their morning feasts.  Clever critters, they cease their reaping during the summer months, when the fruit is hard and growing, only to return in the fall, when the avocados are ripe; then they switch to eating the soft, outsides flesh, and leave us the large and naked pits.  Thanks a lot! 

Their depredations are tolerable in good years when the crop is abundant.  Not so in the lean years when the distribution of the bounty is unequal, and we, the legal owners of the tree (tell that to the squirrels!) go without.

My wife Timarie admits to some innocent guilt in provoking the hostilities.  When she first saw them galloping atop our backyard wall, she put out some peanuts for the little charmers, who soon turned into rude guests, then insolent squatters.  Our avocado tree became their Land of Canaan.

But whatever the innocent origins, we are now at war with these impudent rodents.  “I don’t want to kill them,” my wife said at first, “I just want them to stop eating my avocados.”  But what could we really do?  Two landlubbers too old to climb a brittle-branched tree against limber acrobats confident in their arboreal superiority.  To show it, they would spit the springtime seeds our way as we watched.  Talk of adding insult to injury! 

That’s when my wife had had enough and declared total war.  Her choice of weapon was a garden hose, her strategy to catch them lolling in the tree over breakfast and give them a good dousing with a watery blast.  Her success depended on surprise—rising from bed and quietly sneaking outside in her pajamas, creeping with stealth under the eaves of the house to the hose, then turning it on full force to catch them gorging themselves in our tree.  The stream would send them in rapid retreat to parts unknown; and it at least reduced their share of the tree’s fruit…for a day or two maybe.  Then they would be back to feast again, taking advantage of their natural camouflage and the tree’s height.  

I thought we might have an ally in our dog Heidi, an athletic Golden Retriever-White Swiss Shepherd mix who tolerates not invading beasts and can run and cut like a blond flash of light.  Perhaps she could rid us of these bothersome critters; chase them off for good.

One day she got the chance to test her shepherd genes. The braver of the  Rednik couple had strayed deep into our patio to where he or she was enclosed on three sides by walls of the house. Watching from the window, I saw alert Heidi slink into view, to the fourth side, closing the rodent’s exit path. Only a picnic table separated them.  Rednik panicked (or so I thought) and darted right.  Heidi lunged left to block her way.  Rednik moved laterally left to the other side of the table.  Agile Heidi slid to the right to face him or her.  Rednik feinted another right; Heidi fell for the fake as Rednik scurried through the open lane the dog had vacated.  Heidi, frozen and barkless, stared in awe at the bushy tail that quickly vanished up the avocado tree.  Well, back to herding slow, imaginary sheep, Heidi must have thought.

Last week the fray took an ominous turn.  We awoke early to the customary tap of seeds falling on the roof.  My wife got up immediately and launched her stealthy offensive, moving outside under the eaves toward the hose.  Suddenly a racket of caws arose from a quartet of crows perched in the avocado tree, warning Rednik of approaching danger; the bushy-tailed vandal hightailed it out of range and sight.  Drat!  Now the birds had joined the rodents against us, become a failsafe early warning system for the pillagers.  

My wife differs from me on that count; she believes the crows are her well-meaning allies, and the racket they raised was meant to alert her to the presence of the squirrel.  My son says we’re both wrong, that the crows are alerting other crows, not the squirrels.  He says I’m paranoid.  I tell him he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.  (In this wacky age of conspiracy theories, I have a right to my own.)

As most wars do, this one has dragged on beyond all expectations.  Who‘s winning?  It certainly isn’t the bipedal pair on the king-size bed.  I suppose my wife and I could sue for peace.  But why should the Redniks accept?  They clearly have the upper hand…and a dependable food supply for years to come.  Allied now with the wise crows, they outnumber us, and, painful to admit, they outthink us.  I hope in victory, they will be gracious and leave us our sharecroppers’ pittance of the great green fruit, that marvelous gift from the Aztecs.

Defeat has a way of forcing philosophical reflection on the loser.  Couple that with the wisdom age brings, and I can see why they would gang up on us.  Why shouldn’t they?  It’s about time we took some payback from the animal kingdom for our bully behavior of all creatures great and small, and those extinct by our hand. 

And, of course, I can always go to Sprouts when they have their special of three jumbos for five dollars.

STRAWS IN A MAY WIND

Members of the Huntington Beach Chapter of Drinking Liberally were polled on May 21, 2019 for their preferences for a Democratic ticket to oppose Trump in next year’s presidential contest.  Some results were predictable, and some truly surprising.  For example, California’s native daughter Kamala Harris was predictably strong, though mostly as a candidate for VP.  Joe Biden finished strongest of all by far, though he may have lost some ground since the poll was taken.  Elizabeth Warren shows mounting strength and runs second.  The biggest puzzle was how poorly Bernie Sanders fared—just a single vote for VP out of the sample size of forty.  Does this anomaly say something about Orange County liberals who haven’t had Democratic representation in many decades?  Are they not as liberal as they think?  To be learned in the months ahead.

When questioned on whether or not they favored impeaching President Trump, this same group of Orange County liberals were far less decisive, pretty much mirroring the uncertainty of Democrats in national polls:  

Yes:  15    

No:   12    

Undecided/No Opinion:   13  

(Note: Sentiment is moving toward “yes” steadily since this poll was taken.)

TIME FOR A SELF PROMOTION

As you may have heard a few weeks back, Donald J. Trump, while trashing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to the world, promoted himself from a “Stable Genius” to an “Extremely Stable Genius.”  This on the telly!   To the World!  Shamelessly!  I mean, where’s the modesty?

Okay, so I’m jealous.  I haven’t received a promotion in years and I think I deserve one.  So I’m taking my lead from our alleged leader and giving myself a new brand on my own.  I am no longer a “geezer” (see book title above); I’m a “gaffer.”

An explanation may be in order.  For as long as I can remember, I’ve been in love with words.  Their meanings, their sounds, their origins…everything about them.

Back when I was a teenager, for instance, I looked forward to the arrival each month of the family’s Readers’ Digest, so I could take the build-your-vocabulary test before anybody else could read of the latest cancer cure.  When I returned from Korean War duty in the Air Force, I enrolled in UCLA as an English major.  Words. After getting my bachelor’s degree, I switched to journalism for my master’s degree. Words, words.  After that I worked for 20 years on newspapers and magazines, then wrote books, then returned to university life to teach journalism and literature.  Words, words, words.  A lifetime of total immersion in words.  Then I retired and somewhere along the way picked up the “geezer” tag.

Shame of shames for a self-described word man!  I never even bothered to look up the meaning of the word until last week, and was I surprised when I did!  Pejorative, derogatory, putdown definitions abound: odd, cranky, crotchety, eccentric, a cantankerous old man, the toothless guy you see squatting outside a bar with the day’s painkiller concealed in a brown paper bag.  

That is not I!  I may be a bit odd if you think wearing your clothes inside-out half the time qualifies, but otherwise I’m a kind, reasonable, self-medicating, with-it senior citizen, and if you don’t believe me, you can check with…well, just take my word on it.

Call me a gaffer now.  Truth is, I didn’t know the precise meaning of that word either, until I looked up “geezer.”  I had seen the word “gaffer” before on the film-end credits of movies and television shows, and assumed it humored the dotty old guy who polished the camera lens.  Wrong again.  Turns out the specialized meaning of gaffer identifies the chief electrician of said productions.  

The word in its other definition is primarily used by the Brits, and thought by some etymologists to be a sixteenth century contraction of “godfather.”  Gaffer is “often used affectionately;” it also denotes a “boss,” or “foreman.”  Sounds like my kind of word…made for me.

Isn’t it odd that Dear Leader’s false vanity should have led me to find my true identity?  There must be a word for that.  I’ll have to look it up.

FORGET THE BORDER WALL—REBUILD THE BLUE WALL!

Gambling Man, Part II

From the dawn of infancy we are told we live in a binary world of black/white, yes/no, good/bad, either/or, is/isn’t, and so on.  As we grow up most of us discover it isn’t that simple…there is the color gray, the word maybe, nuance, uncertainty, a muddled muddy middle ground that can even light the way to relativity.

Gamblers by their trade quickly learn they are in a win/lose world governed by the laws of probability; in statistics probability is defined as “the relative possibility that an event will occur, as expressed by the ratio of the actual occurrences to the total number of possible occurrences.”  Gamblers simply call it “the odds.” 

A small-time player, I didn’t catch up with the real gamers until I took a college philosophy course that required much forced reading of David Hume; thereafter I became a rejecter of absolutes, a skeptical relativist, a probability addict.  I had to quantify in my mind the likelihood of any event happening.     

Example?  Take the presidential election of 2016.  I gave Trump a one in ten chance (10% yes, 90% no) of winning…and thought I was more than generous to him with that spread.

The tectonic shock of Trump’s triumph sent my trust in the laws of probability plunging.  When it surfaced from the post-election depths of the Mariana Trench, I resigned myself to the reality that the near impossible was indeed possible.  Indeed, it had happened.  But why?  How?

Yes, there were early rumors that Russian meddling had determined the outcome.  I didn’t pay them much mind—10% to 90% chance of that happening.  But after the firing of FBI chief James Comey and the ensuing appointment of Robert Mueller as Special Counsel charged with investigating any ties between the Russians and the Trump campaign, I cut the odds to 20% to 80%.  Still unlikely though.  So I reckoned, ever so briefly.

Wrong again.  Mueller and his skilled body of prosecutors methodically proved Russian meddling (and Trump campaign complicity) with awesome detail and precision over the next 22 months.  For me, the evidentiary avalanche choked off the lame denials of Trump and his minions, and convinced me he was guilty of “collusion” (actually, conspiracy to defraud the United States). 

How could he not be in on the coup when Mueller indicted 13 Russian nationals (by name), three Russian companies (by name), 12 Russian intelligence officers (by name), not to mention key Russian agent Konstantin Kalimnik; got convictions of Trump insiders Paul Manafort, Michael Cohen, Michael Flynn, George Papadopoulos, W. Samuel Patten, Richard Pinedo, Alex van der Zwaan; obtained confessions of guilt from Rick Gates among others cooperating with the Special Prosecutor.  And how many other cases like Roger Stone’s are working their way through the legal system that we haven’t heard about?

But did Russian interference actually alter the final vote count, you might ask?  Put Trump over the top?  That partisan debate has raged among researchers ever since November 2016, advocates of pro and con split along ideological lines.  While I strongly suspected it must have, the lack of hard numbers in support limited me to assigning a probability of no better than 91 yes, 9 no—not enough to establish his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

Would I ever find the necessary numbers to clinch my case?  Yes!  Only last month.  In Volume I of The Mueller Report.  We had previously learned late in the Mueller investigation that Paul Manafort and his associate Rick Gates had met with and given vital polling data to Russian agent Konstantin Kilimnik; but I could find no details other than that the meeting took place August 2, 2016 in New York City’s Grand Havana Club.  What data?  Targeting whom?

Eureka!  See page 140 of Book I:

Manafort briefed Kilimnik on the state of the Trump Campaign and Manafort’s plan to win the election.  That briefing encompassed the Campaign’s messaging and its internal polling data.  According to Gates, it also included discussion of “battleground” states, which Manafort identified as Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Minnesota....

Those states are called by political scientists “The Blue Wall”—the Democrats’ traditional stronghold in the industrial upper Midwest that Trump with the aid of the Russians breached.  You doubt that such a grand heist was possible?  Remember those many millions of bots and divisive social messages secretly sent from Leningrad, not to mention the Russian agents on our own home soil sowing discord and hate among unsuspecting American voters?  Then look at the electoral facts and numbers below.

Pennsylvania hadn’t voted Republican for president since 1988—28 yeas ago.  In 2012 Democrat Obama defeated Republican Romney by 512,232.  In 2016 Trump won by 44,292; that’s a swing of 556,524 votes.  Not statistically likely, without some external meddling.

Michigan hadn’t voted Republican for president since 1988.  In 2012 Democrat Obama defeated Republican Romney by 449,313.  In 2016 Trump won by 10,704; that’s a swing of 460,017.  That’s also near impossible without some interference from abroad.

Wisconsin hadn’t voted Republican for president since 1984—32 years ago.  In 2012 Democrat Obama defeated Republican Romney by 210,017.  In 2016 Trump won by 22,748; that’s an improbable swing of 232,765.  Take a bow, you clever Russkies.  We may have won the Cold War, but you guys have won the Cyber War…and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

Minnesota, which hadn’t gone Republican since 1972, just did manage to withstand the Russo-Trumpo assault on our democracy and stay blue by a mere 44,593 votes.

So let me add up those countless bots, the many millions of rancid social media messages, and the Russian provocateurs on our own turf pitting American against American, then apply the laws of probability.  And what do I get?  The Russians, beyond a reasonable doubt (98.2 to 1.8 on my probability scale), breached The Blue Wall, flipped the three states’ 46 electoral votes, and swung the election to Trump. 

Now that we know what the Trump Campaign did in 2016, are we any better off approaching the 2020 presidential election?  Hardly.  We’re actually worse off.  The Russians, with Trump’s passive encouragement have only further perfected their cyber skills, while we struggle to catch up.  Moreover, who knows what grand mischief Target Trump and Dear Vlad are hatching in their ongoing private trysts?

Which begs the crucial question.  Could the Trump/Putin axis steal another presidential election in 2020?  And subject us all to another four years of enforced madness?  Improbable no longer, given 2016.

Democracies are historically rare and short-lived.  Tyranny or anarchy are their common heirs.  Of course, there is a third saving option: a rational and likeminded people addicted to democracy (say the folks in the Pacific states of California, Oregon, Washington and Hawaii) could peacefully form a more perfect union of their own.  Call it Pacifica!—with a new and revised Constitution patched where Trump tore so many holes in the former.  Please keep the thought in mind.  You know, in case of fire, break the glass.

PROBABILITY AND THE SMALL-TIME PLAYER

Gambling Man, Part I

Confession to make.  I’ve got the gambling gene.  But, through some costly lessons learned over many years,  I now keep that bug on a tight leash.  Those lessons have kept me away from roulette wheels, crap tables, blackjack tables, bingo, slots, and all the other games where the odds are stacked in the House’s favor.  Haven’t been to Vegas in two decades. 

An exception to the above…on one occasion, during my five years of living dangerously as a freelance writer, I arrogantly thought I could best the House and beat the ponies—even though the state and track skimmed off 22% from the pari-mutuel betting pools.  Yes, I fancied myself that good a handicapper.

So, backed up with a story assignment from Los Angeles Magazine, I scraped together a small stake of $200 and headed to Santa Anita, that lovely, pansy-covered graveyard of dashed dreams, to make my fortune.  After ten days among the railbirds, I quit.  

Why?  When I was slightly in the black?  Well, the work was just too hard—14 hours a day spent poring over the Daily Racing Form, commuting to and from the lovely oval, checking out the thoroughbreds in the walking ring, pacing nervously up and down the homestretch between races, and so forth…too much.

Moreover, when I took my winnings and subtracted my daily business expenses—gas, Racing Form, admission, program, parking, lunch, etc.—I had only made 37 cents an hour.  That was less than I was making as a freelance writer!  

When you can’t beat them, you join them.  That’s what I did, freed myself of the House’s big bite, and did so profitably.  How?  By joining friendly poker groups, where my skill level was the equal of (or slightly better than) my fellow owners of the House.  Caution:  If you are tempted to step up in class, seek a higher level of competition, do so cautiously.  You don’t want to be the mark in a new group.  And after two rounds of dealing, if you haven’t figured out who the mark is, you are the mark.  Fold ‘em and go home.

There’s a gambling game for most everybody…one where you excel and that you like playing.  If you don’t find yours, stay home and watch the Hallmark Channel.  

My game of choice, and a trusty source of income over the years, is cribbage.  How good am I?  Well, according to the vanquished I currently reign as undisputed champ of the Milky Way Galaxy, Western Division. 

Enough, you say.  Why do I bore you with these tedious details of my brushes with sins past?  Why should  this meandering narrative of my lessons learned as a small-time gambler be of interest to you?    Because what I learned of the laws of probability and applied to the Mueller Report has led me to conclude, beyond a reasonable doubt, that Russian meddling did indeed elect Donald J. Trump president of the United States.   The proof will be presented in Part II of this educational confessional.

SWAMP-DREDGING THE TRUMPIAN WAY

The Federal Reserve Board of Governors must be bracing themselves for President Trump’s approaching fecal touch.  Meet Stephen Moore and Herman Cain whom Dear Leader has plucked from the swamp’s depths to sit on the august, nonpartisan body that sets our monetary policy.  No derisive laughs, please.

Stephen Moore certainly has the credentials to serve Trump as a member of the Federal Reserve Board.  He was a founder of the conservative Club for Growth; he was a member of the conservative Heritage Foundation; he’s been a gold bug and is a supply-sider; he’s an adulterous deadbeat dad who was held in contempt of court for falling behind in his alimony and child support payments; he owes the IRS $75,000 in back taxes; he’s been on the wrong side of virtually every economic policy he has ever advocated; and he’s the favorite piñata of every liberal economist lucky enough to debate policy with him on the telly.

Then there’s Moore’s some-time associate Herman Cain, who ran briefly for the Republican nomination for President in 2012 and whom Trump has called “a truly outstanding individual.” He also would bring to the Board qualifications Trump should find appealing.  They share a rich history of sexual misconduct against women; they are both serial philanderers who have paid off women (that’s a plural for both) for their silence; they are both businessmen, one in real estate and the other peddling pizzas and erectile dysfunction cures; they both dabble in economic innovation, the president in mounting mindless trade wars, the jovial molester in his briefly popular 9-9-9 theory of economics (presumably developed when he sat in the Thorstein Veblen Chair at Pokemon Polytechnic).

On the policy front, the lickspittle pair from down there also share one overriding qualification: Both Moore and Cain favor lowering interest rates, which, conveniently, Trump also wants to aid his reelection chances while saving bucks on his own debt.  What’s in it for the suitors?  Obvious.  Both are partisan but “flexible” conservatives seeking a cushy federal government job. 

Some Republican senators are hesitant to approve Moore, and a least four are openly against Cain...they think the Pokemon Scholar lacks academic credentials.  Likewise among the naysayers, Democrats believe that Trump’s floating of both bottom-feeders from the swamp’s fathomage is just a diversionary ploy to distract us.  From?  His scandals past, present, and still to come.  Dear Leader is known to do such things.  

ANOTHER CASUALTY ON THE SOUTHERN FRONT

When our Dear Leader got Vlad’s permission to become President of the United States, Donald J. Trump promised to bring “the best people” to Washington with him.  Little did we know that the chosen “best” would literally come and go in droves, like thieves in the night.  Most of them turned out to be less than the best, however.  Some quit, some were “replaced,” and some just absconded with all the loot they could cram into a U-Haul, not waiting to be the next victim of our Commander-in-chief’s friendly fire.  Yep.  Trump’s “best” don’t last long, but are purged at the whim of Il Duce himself.   

 We regret to inform you that yet another loyal, high-ranking “best” bit the proverbial dust last week.  That latest among the fallen would be former Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen, who was terminated (resigned or fired?) last Sunday in a border-skirmish with Trump himself.  Her crime?  She had lied to Congress for him; she had backed him on building the Great Wall of Porosity; she even went along with stealing immigrant children from their parents at the border.  But she balked when he asked her to turn away asylum-seekers and their kids; that was against the law.

The Nordic ice queen remained gracious in departure, though, expressing her gratitude to Trump for being allowed to serve in his administration, perhaps with a strategic eye to finding employment in corporate America where her kind are not unappreciated.

Our President immediately appointed Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Kevin McAleenan to fill the open position.  According to The New York Times and CNN, Trump told the newcomer to close the border to asylum-seekers and tell them our country was “full;” he would pardon Kevin if he were convicted of a crime.

Gosh, golly and gee wilikers!  Isn’t it a crime to order others to commit illegal acts?  Used to be.  Is the New Order of Gauleiter Trump upon us already?  

Shouldn’t impeachment proceedings against you-know-who begin about now?

A CURE FOR OUR ILLS

BY GUEST CONTRIBUTOR DOULAS GAHN 

President Donald J. Trump lately has been on the warpath against Obamacare again, saying he will take his case all he way to the Supreme Court.  “We will have a plan far better than Obamacare,” he promised.  “The Republican Party will soon be known as the party of healthcare.”

Republicans in Congress kept their silence, avoiding any talk of such an honor or a plan.  Which brings us to major question we’ve failed to answer for generations: isn’t it time we went to Medicare for all?  Or a single-payer system of healthcare? 

The reflexive Republican response is that we can’t afford either.  Yet a review of our current system reveals that healthcare is too costly, unsustainable, and results in the unequal delivery of care, with overall health outcomes near the bottom of countries with the 30 largest economies.  More to the point, we can’t afford not to have Medicare for all, or a single-payer system.  The present mishmash costs the United States, as a whole, significantly more than most other developed nations to provide healthcare to its citizens, which means it is costing us individually, in dollars and health, for not moving to a more rational system. 

Let’s look at the spending comparison below (from 2017, courtesy of the Kaiser Family Foundation) and why it matters.  What leaps out is that the United States spends more per capita and a higher percentage of our GDP than any other nation.  And not by a little, but a lot.

So not only does the United States spend roughly 50 percent more per capita on healthcare, but our spending is very inefficient.  The other nations listed above all have excellent, state-of-the-art healthcare provided at roughly half of our cost.

Let’s review the many ways that this inefficient over-spending affects our overall economy.

First, it means lost opportunities to spend more on education, infrastructure, research and development, and affordable housing.  This makes our nation and our nation’s businesses less competitive on the world stage.  

Second, when large U.S. businesses spend more on employee healthcare, they either raise the cost of producing goods and services or lower profits when you account for their employees’ health insurance.  That also means less money to devote to research and development, spend on new equipment, and divert to employee training.  Result?  Their competitiveness suffers internationally. 

Third, the negative impact on our economy is the burdensome costs to small businesses (often cited as the backbone of our economy), where a significant amount of our economic growth and innovation occurs.  Because they have higher insurance costs compared to large corporations, small businesses suffer growth lags, and new startups are fewer.  It is worth noting that the number of new business startups have been decreasing over the last four decades in the United States.  This is partly due to the cost of healthcare and the time and effort required to provide it; such distractions are the last thing a new entrepreneur needs in today’s fast-paced business environment.

Not only are the costs for small businesses higher per capita, but the businesses generally try to reduce their costs by either offering less-generous benefits or passing on to their employees more of the costs, which makes the businesses less likely to keep quality employees, thereby reducing their competitiveness.

Fourth, our inefficient spending suppresses entrepreneurship.  An individual looking to start a new business has a great challenge ahead to begin with, but adding the extremely high cost of individual or single-family coverage poses an even higher hurdle.  Many with talent and a good idea choose to stay put and give up their dreams rather than put their families at risk with expensive and inadequate healthcare.

Fifth, inefficient healthcare spending indirectly discourages workers from looking for other jobs.  Because they fear losing insurance coverage or getting stuck with lower-quality insurance, workers stay locked into jobs they may not want due to work conditions, hours, location, or pay; they feel they can’t risk losing their insurance by seeking more satisfying opportunities.  This fear can force some people to work full time when they would prefer part-time work due to age, family situation, or medical conditions.  (In addition, if healthcare were decoupled from the workplace, it would discourage employers from hiring people part time in order to avoid paying for their health insurance.)  In short, worrying about insurance costs decreases workers’ productivity—unhappy workers are unproductive workers.

Sixth, rural access to good healthcare is decreasing rapidly, resulting in inappropriate use of costly emergent care and poor outcomes; often patients wait too long to get preventive care, and their medical conditions have worsened unnecessarily.  In a for-profit system, providers have no incentive to bring healthcare to rustics at a reasonable cost, or at all, in low-density areas.

Seventh, and as important as any other ill effect, medical bills are the leading cause of bankruptcy in the United States.  Between 55 and 60 percent of all bankruptcies are traceable to medical expenses, and over 80 percent of them involve individuals whose health insurance is inadequate.

Market economics may work well in most sectors, but not healthcare, where the more private the system the greater the costs.  Switzerland, for example, has a larger private system than almost the rest of the countries listed above and it has the second highest costs, behind only the United States.

Add it all up and what do you get?  Making healthcare a right and not a privilege is not only the moral thing to do, it is the economically smart thing to do.

Douglas Gahn is co-founder of Silver Summit Financial, which specializes in financial and retirement planning.

THE OLD MAN OF SUMMER, AT YOUR SERVICE

Spring has sprung and an old man’s fancy naturally turns to…baseball!  Oh the memories!  The boy standing on the green diamond lit by a young sun, 34-inch Jackie Robinson model Louisville Slugger in hand, the already well-oiled Mickey Mantle Rawlings glove on the bench waiting to be worn again, the sweet smell of resin wafting in from the pitching mound as the tall southpaw goes into his wind-up…Oh!  Baseball were Paradise enow!

Enough of this bourgeois sentimentality!  Time to put aside childhood memories and unleash these arthritic fingers to attack the keyboard and provide you with my winning picks for the 2019 Major League Baseball season.  Those bettors who have relied on my remarkable predictive powers in the past can finally buy that winter hideaway on Bora Bora.  And if it is within walking distance, I’ll be there to welcome you and accept your thanks.

No such luck for you pony players.  This year I will forego my handicapping of the Run for the Roses in early May.  The tragic death of 22 horses at Santa Anita and the subsequent interruption in the racing season have scrambled my handicapping skills; and I don’t want to give you a bum steer…or a lame nag, if you prefer.  (I will, of course, pass on any late-breaking tips I get from my shadowy sources in the you-know-where.) 

Back to inside baseball and your proven guide to wealth and happiness.  Know that the Minnesota Twins are the most improved team in baseball and may overtake Cleveland in the weak American League Central; the Indians, having let many of their best players go in a cost-saving move, may still hold on by virtue of their excellent starting pitching.  Stand-pat Boston will whip the Yankees again; the Bronx Bombers will bomb away once more, but that starting pitching is too iffy.  The slow-building Tampa Bay Rays will creep closer to them both this year.  In the West young and loaded Houston will prevail again over Oakland, which just can’t continue to pull rabbits out of that cheap and tattered hat.  The lazy Angels and indecisive Mariners will fill the midpack.  Yes, the Red Sox and Astros will again battle for a World Series berth; this time the coin flip goes Houston’s way.

Meanwhile, in the National League I will go against the grain and pick the Nats over the loaded Phillies.  Yes, I know that the great Bryce Harper has moved from Washington to Philadelphia; I’m just gambling that the Nationals’ acquisition of catcher Yan Gomes will finally straighten out that pitching staff and they will live up to years of hype.  Atlanta is good, but they hang in the stretch.  The talented Mets will find a way to screw up again.  In the National League Central, the most wide-open of all divisions, figure a close, three-way fight for first.  The Cubs are still balanced and solid, the Cardinals with the addition of Paul Goldschmidt are improved, and in Milwaukee there is a mighty reincarnation of Harvey’s Wallbangers (but the pitching?).  Flip a three-sided coin for that winner.  Also, the Reds are rebuilding, while Pittsburgh seems confused.  Out West the deep in talent and pockets Dodgers are the choice…to win the Division championship (with the Rockies nipping at their heels) and the League Championship (against the Phillies perhaps?)…but not the coveted World Series.  Those AL teams still are just too tough.  San Diego will finally improve, while Arizona, another team to dump its talent to save bucks, will drop like a ton of rocks.

Remember, the detailed picks below carry my standard guarantee: if the teams do not appear in the precise order predicted, you will receive next year’s selections absolutely free!

BN: When I was one and twenty I heard a wise man say the existence of baseball was proof of the existence of God.  Jes’ repeatin.